Policy-related uncertainty is higher than it's been in decades, having intensified after the surprise election of Donald Trump, whose agenda and style of government differ significantly from what came before it, says Steven Davis, a professor of business economics at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.

It is hardly surprising that government — not Wall Street or big business — gets the blame. As noted in another study by economists at Princeton, the University of Chicago and the University of British Columbia, it is the government that mediates the competing interests of creditors and debtors.

Firms are seen as entities trying to maximize profits by managing resources efficiently. This benign definition might not hold for big companies, whose revenues rival that of governments, argues Luigi Zingales, professor of finance at the Chicago Booth School of Business.

Stacey Kole, a clinical professor of economics and deputy dean of the full-time MBA program at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, says an excellent business school is one that not only discusses current business trends but also teaches survival strategies that will help students confront unanticipated changes throughout their business careers.

In a recent paper, Bank of Italy's Emilia Bonaccorsi di Patti and the University of Chicago's Anil Kashyap found that banks which successfully recover from sharp drops in profitability have something in common: They avoid throwing good money after bad by resolutely shutting off credit to their riskiest clients.

Richard Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago School of Business, suggests a way to dispense with malpractice insurance pre­miums altogether: Those with a record of providing high-quality care at good value could apply to the government for a safe harbor from malpractice suits. Organi­zations that receive this status could require patients to waive their right to sue for adverse outcomes.

In an op-ed, Devin Pope, professor of behavioral science and does research in behavioral economics, writes, "Women, as a now-former Google engineer recently reminded the world, are underrepresented in several mathematical fields, including physics, computer science and engineering. The causes of that under-representation are hotly debated, with barriers to entry and gender differences in test scores widely discussed as underlying reasons. But new data analysis underscores the importance of another factor in the gap: confidence."

Neale Mahoney, an associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, says 50% is probably too high a number to attribute solely to medical debt: the equivalent of about 382,000 annual medical-related bankruptcy filings last year.

In one 2014 study by Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the author of Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel and Want, participants heading to work via train either refrained from engaging with fellow passengers or made conversation.

“When policy uncertainty goes up, firms that are more exposed to the policy have a bigger pull back,” said Steven Davis, a professor of international business and economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

“It is difficult to find systematic evidence from the recent crisis that involvement in proprietary trading increased the risk of failure,” wrote Randall S. Kroszner, a former member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve and professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, in a recent academic paper.

"I foray out from academia for a few years at a time and I'm always happy to return," he says from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he has been a long-time professor of finance.

A recent analysis from economists Thomas Picketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman cited by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business found that the bottom 50% of Americans saw zero income growth over the past 35 years.

It will be valuable for the Fed to start cutting its balance sheet sooner rather than later so that they can do it gently in the back ground without scaring the markets like in 2013, said Randall S Kroszner, an economics professor at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.

Luigi Zingales of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and Oliver Hart of Harvard start with the proposition that company managers and boards do indeed have a fiduciary duty to shareholders, but their duty is to maximize the shareholders’ overall welfare, which includes things other than the value of their shares.

Or perhaps the shareholders do own the corporation, but its job is not to maximize their wealth. What would its job be, then? Oliver Hart of Harvard and Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago answer: "Companies Should Maximize Shareholder Welfare Not Market Value."

The central-bank chief must be “able to successfully deal with Italy’s banking crisis, which isn’t over yet,” said Luigi Zingales, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, who himself has been mentioned as a possible choice by Rome’s la Repubblica newspaper.

In a new Stigler Center paper, Harvard Professor and Nobel laureate Oliver Hart and University of Chicago Booth School of Business Professor Luigi Zingales (Faculty Director of the Stigler Center and one of the editors of this blog) take a novel perspective to this question. While agreeing with Friedman’s premise that managers should care only about shareholders’ interest, Hart and Zingales reject the view that shareholders only care about money.

For positive experiences, consumers are reluctant to eliminate categories, while the opposite is true for negative experiences because eliminating categories makes it feel like more of the experience has passed,” write authors Anuj K. Shah (University of Chicago Booth School of Business) and Adam L. Alter (New York University).

University of Chicago behavioral economics professor Richard Thaler told me plainly that we’re not doing our job if we don’t know this stuff, and I believe the CFP® Board can do a lot to enhance their requisite training in this arena.

Luigi Zingales, director of the university’s Stigler Center, likes to remind people that the reason Google and Facebook were able to succeed is that the U.S. in 1998, under Bill Clinton, sued Microsoft Corp. for tying its web browser to its Windows operating system to undermine rival Netscape.

One such scenario is described in the following survey question, submitted in June 2016 to a panel of economists by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business: “Granting every American citizen over 21 years old a universal basic income of $13,000 a year—financed by eliminating all transfer programs (including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing subsidies, household welfare payments and farm and corporate subsidies)—would be a better policy than the status quo.” Only 2 percent of survey respondents agreed whereas 43 percent disagreed and 17 percent strongly disagreed.

In a 2012 survey of 41 prominent economists by the University of Chicago, 85 percent agreed that Americans were better off under NAFTA than under previous trade rules. Only 5 percent said they were uncertain, and none disagreed.

Raghuram Rajan, a world-renowned economist (ex-chief economist of the IMF) with global authority through lectures (in leading institutions like Chicago’s Booth School, Princeton, etc.) and numerous prestigious publications on capital and monetary management, entrepreneurial innovation and on the role of a responsible government, was selected 4 years back.

The researchers—Kerwin Kofi Charles and Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago, Mark Aguiar of Princeton, and Mark Bils of the University of Rochester—start with the observation that the hours worked by young men aged 21 to 30 have fallen 12% from their peak in 2000 to 2015. For older men aged 31 to 55, the fall in hours worked was 8% over the same period.

The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, for example, has about 414 international students (34.9% of total full-time enrollment), while Columbia Business School has 372 (48%), Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business has 343 (38.3%), Harvard Business School has 331 (35%), MIT’s Sloan School of Management has 312 (38.6%), both Yale University School of Management (36.9%) and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business (32%) have 256, and UCLA’s Anderson School of Management has 230 (31.3%).

It’s a sign of the times. The top three undergraduate universities have long been known by the shorthand HYP (Harvard, Yale and Princeton), while the top three business schools have gone by the acronym HSW, obviously meaning Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton. In recent years, the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business has come on so strong that many think the W has fallen off the acronym.

New research from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business suggests that may not be the case. Researchers found that while people expect to enjoy fun activities more if they’ve completed work first, play before work is in fact just as fun as its opposite.

Does this sound far-fetched? More often than any of us care to admit, investors’ behavior is shaped by what Richard Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, calls SIFs, “supposedly irrelevant factors” rooted in mood and emotion.

Fun stuff is just as fun even if you haven’t “earned” it. Ed O’Brien, a professor at the Chicago Booth School of Business, co-authored this new study, published in Psychological Science, and he wrote about his work this week for Harvard Business Review.

“There has been a lot of research on how technology affects labor demand, how robots are displacing workers,” said Erik Hurst, an economist from the University of Chicago who was one of the researchers involved in the study, which was published Monday. “But no one had really looked at the effect of technology on someone’s willingness to work.”

"When we look in the data, you see for young men this huge shift in time spent toward computer activities," which is primarily due to computer games, said Erik Hurst, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and one of the authors of the paper, published at the National Bureau of Economic Research. "Time changes are usually more gradual, and the heart of the paper is trying to disentangle why this change occurred."

In fact, there are few policy topics on which economists agree more – only one out of 35 of the top economists polled by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business believes that the benefits of sports subsidies outweigh their costs to taxpayers.

In the new study, published this week in Psychological Science, Ed O’Brien, a social psychologist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, set up a series of experiments with a colleague to test whether delaying gratification pays off the way we expect.

In 2013, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business published a paper that looked at 4,000 married couples in America. It found that once a woman started to earn more than her husband, divorce rates increased.

The Research Affiliates’ study doesn’t disprove the impact of politics on the U.S. market, according to Pietro Veronesi at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Veronesi, with his colleague Lubos Pastor, have posited that investors demand higher equity risk premiums in the U.S. under Democratic presidents, due in part to expectations of higher tax rates.

"When you're doing your taxes, you're just the IRS' lowest-paid employee," said Austan Goolsbee, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and former chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. "All you’re doing is typing in information they already have."

Companies founded from 2009 to 2011 had a nearly 51 percent chance of still being in business five years later, almost 3 percent higher than the average survival of a company for the previous 15 years, according to Waverly Deutsch, a professor of entrepreneurship at Booth.

According to data compiled by Eugene Fama, a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Kenneth French, a finance professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, the decile of stocks with the highest momentum beat the S&P 500 by just 1.3 percentage points over the 10 years through March 31 of this year (before transaction costs).

"It was a great business until the people at the top decided that strategy didn't matter for them and that they would forever be able to play the same game and win," said James Schrager, clinical professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.

Indeed, low natural gas prices are expected to support further U.S. emissions reductions, noted Randy Kroszner, economics professor at the University of Chicago and former Federal Reserve Governor. In fact, he added, Beijing is the one most in need of reform: "The key for world climate change is China."

Research done by Professors Eugene Fama at the University of Chicago and Kenneth French at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College have presented findings that suggest strong returns of actively managed mutual funds is more due to luck and not skill. If Fama and French are correct, your investments is not the place to be active.

Among the speakers that year was Dr Raghuram Rajan, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund who was given the job two years earlier at age 40. It was meant to be a celebration of the Greenspan era but what the audience, which included Mr Greenspan, heard from Dr Rajan was a prognosis of dire tidings to come.

The AMPF, held at the Shangri-La Hotel, is co-organised by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, the National University of Singapore Business School and the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

“I used to go around asking CFOs why they had split their stock, and their tried-and-true answer was usually that investors expected them to be in some range,” said economist Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, who co-authored an academic paper on stock splits with Mr. Weld in 2009. Mr. Thaler isn’t convinced: “That never made sense to me.”

"Banks are in a much safer place than they were. The problem is the overall level of risk in the economy hasn't diminished considerably. If you make the banks safer, it has to go somewhere else," said < a href="https://www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/r/raghuram-g-rajan">Rajan, who is currently a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

She pointed to the plummeting employment rate of young men as one macro-development related to iGen, and cited the work of University of Chicago economist Erik Hurst. Last year, in a university profile, Hurst discussed his research on the dwindling percentage of young males without a college degree in the labor force and this trend’s connection to leisure-time technology.

But as University of Chicago Booth School professor Luigi Zingales, who recently organised a conference around corporate power and its dampening effect on the economy, points out: “It’s not that we don’t pay for digital services — we do pay dearly, with our data, and our attention.”

In fact, in a recent paper, University of Chicago Booth School of Business economics professor Owen Zidar looked at changes to the tax code over the postwar period, with an eye toward comparing the economic effects of tax cuts felt by the rich vs. the poor. He found that the relationship between tax cuts and job growth is primarily driven by cuts for lower-income groups and that the economic effects of tax cuts for the top 10 percent are tiny.

During the May 8 edition of CNN Newsroom, Moore — CNN’s “senior economics analyst” — was joined by University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee to discuss the merits of billionaire businessman and philanthropist Warren Buffett’s argument that the Trump health care agenda amounts to little more than a tax cut for the rich funded by cuts to health care subsidies for low-income Americans.

University of Chicago Booth School of Business Professor Randy Kroszner discusses what’s good and bad in the Volcker Rule as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is said to have begun a review of the rule.

John Paul Rollert, an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and author of a blistering takedown of Spirit Airlines, says the ease of filming such interactions means airlines “have to get used to the fact that people are watching at all times.”

“There is no doubt that men are working much less during the 2000s, and it doesn’t look like it’s a cyclical pattern as much as it is structural,” said Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

Out of 42 top economists surveyed by the Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, 37 said Trump’s proposal would not pay for itself through added growth. The other five did not answer the question.

The University of Chicago's Booth School of Business regularly polls economists on controversial questions. In a survey the school published last week on Trump's tax plans, only two out of the 37 economists that responded said that the cuts would stimulate the economy enough to cancel out the effect on total tax revenue.

Those two economists now both say they made a mistake, and that they misunderstood the question.

“We have to focus on upgrading skills of American workers,” said Raghuram Rajan, a University of Chicago professor and former governor of India’s central bank. A lot of the new jobs, he added, are in the service industry, but getting them into rural areas and smaller communities is a big challenge. “These are important questions that the administration has to ask.”

In 2012, 95 percent of leading economists surveyed by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business agreed with the following statement: “Freer trade improves productive efficiency and offers consumers better choices, and in the long run these gains are much larger than any effects on employment.”

That is because working towards a comfortable retirement maybe a mere justification for keeping busy. Chicago Booth professor Christopher Hsee says that an important reason people engage in activities is that they dislike being idle.

Richard Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago and one of the field’s pioneers, told The Wall Street Journal in 2015 that saving for retirement is “a prototypical behavioral-economics problem” because it is “cognitively hard—figuring out how much to save—and requires self-control.”

That’s a shame because, as a new study shows, cutting taxes on the poor is a good way to boost economic growth. Owen Zidar, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, looked at tax cuts in the US for the postwar period, then at their impact on different states. He found that a lot more jobs were generated in the poorer states for each tax cut than in the richer ones.

The Seahawks even have an academic validation for their MO. In his 2016 book “Misbehaving,” University of Chicago economist Richard H. Thaler argues that teams should always trade out of the first round for multiple picks in the second or later rounds.

In fact, in a 1999 analysis of six tax changes since 1922, University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee found that it was quite unlikely the government would raise more revenue that would offset increasing deficits by cutting marginal tax rates below where they are now.

“What is different this time is that all the engines are firing for the first time,” says Raghuram Rajan, a former Indian central bank governor and IMF chief economist. “They are not firing very strongly. But they are firing.”

“I don’t think there is any reason to believe Millennials are more risk averse than other (generational) cohorts,” says Richard Thaler, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

"It's easy to imagine all the ways things will go badly or believe that this person doesn't want to connect," Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business told the New York Times. But if you reach out, he continued, "almost everybody reaches back."

The distinct Booth experience is something that the school’s Associate Dean for Student Recruitment and Admissions, Kurt Ahlm is keenly aware of as he and his team put together the application each year

She summarized University of Chicago Booth School of Business findings for NPR, saying that, in their sample, dissatisfaction increased, and could lead to divorce, "once a woman started to earn more than her husband."

Now it’s putting some distance between it and the next biggest finance factory: In 2016 the second-most finance MBAs came not from the Northeast but the Midwest, the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, which moved up to 35.0% from 34.8% in 2015.

A recent paper by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business professor Owen Zidar demonstrates the differences between cutting taxes for the well-off and cutting them for those of modest means.

Commentary by John Paul Rollert. United has now offered Dao a sincere apology—Munoz said Wednesday morning that he felt “shame” over the incident—and one suspects they will soon be offering him a lot of money too. He deserves it. He deserved better. The rest of us do too.

Another objectionable example harkens back to a well-known 2004 paper by Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard University. The economists sent out close to 5,000 identical resumes to 1,300 job advertisements, changing only the applicants' names to be either traditionally European American or African American.

Austan Goolsbee, economics professor at University of Chicago, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of American Action Forum, discuss a letter penned by multiple economist to politicians about the merits of immigration for the U.S.

"If there is excess volatility due to non-fundamental reasons, eliminating it will result in lower volatility and more efficient markets," Stefano Giglio, associate professor of finance at the University of Chicago's Booth School at Business, wrote to CNBC on Monday.

Raghuram Rajan, Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago and former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, warns of more turmoil ahead if the developed world fails to adapt to the fundamental forces of global change.

Eugene Fama is a living legend of modern finance theory. He has been teaching at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business for over 50 years, having earned tenure at the age of 26. He has worked alongside celebrity professors such as Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, and Gary Becker.

The short answer is: rarely. Research by University of Illinois’s Petro Lisowsky and Chicago Booth’s Michael Minnis demonstrates that almost two-thirds of medium-to-larger private companies choose not to produce audited GAAP statements.

I first heard the noted American economist and author Dr. Richard Thaler give a speech about something called “behavioral finance” over 20 years ago. It was my introduction to a new field of research in economics.

Even with new anti-corruption regulations, it's estimated that one out of seven firms suffers from ongoing fraud, according to an August 2014 research paper co-written by Luigi Zingales, a professor at the University of Chicago. (Experts from the University of Toronto and University of California at Berkeley also contributed).

New analysis from Poets and Quants shows that graduates from elite MBA programs are being heavily recruited by tech firms. For instance, over the past five years, Amazon has hired 445 MBA grads from Chicago, Northwestern, MIT, Columbia, Michigan, and Duke.

“Mental accounting is essentially the household equivalent of financial accounting, but it is often done without conscious thought,” says Richard Thaler, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and author of Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics.

"People dread idleness, and their professed reasons for activity may be mere justifications for keeping busy," University of Chicago professor of behavioral science and marketing Christopher Hsee observed.

These aren’t totally uncharted waters. The University of Chicago’s Richard Thaler, one of the world’s leading behavioral economists, has suggested in the past where the line between incentivizing and manipulating lies.

Dr Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago told Quartz, "Historically, anthropomorphising has been treated as a sign of childishness or stupidity, but it's actually a natural byproduct of the tendency that makes humans uniquely smart on this planet.

"Historically, anthropomorphising has been treated as a sign of childishness or stupidity, but it's actually a natural byproduct of the tendency that makes humans uniquely smart on this planet," Dr Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago said.

“Historically, anthropomorphizing has been treated as a sign of childishness or stupidity, but it’s actually a natural byproduct of the tendency that makes humans uniquely smart on this planet,” says Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago.

Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago and an anthropomorphism expert, told Quartz: 'Historically, anthropomorphizing has been treated as a sign of childishness or stupidity, but it’s actually a natural byproduct of the tendency that makes humans uniquely smart on this planet'.

“You need positive feedback if you’re unsure about your task commitment,” says University of Chicago behavioral scientist Ayelet Fishbach, “that is, if you think the task might be too challenging for you. You also need positive feedback if you’re a novice and have only recently started working on the task.”

Despite the uncertainty, they actually report being happier than they were 15 years ago. So what’s making them content to stay out of work? Better video games, says Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago who co-authored a study on this shift in the labor supply:

Writing in the New York Times recently, Ayelet Fisbach, a professor at University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, notes: "People send résumés and go to interviews thinking that they care only about salaries and promotions.

In the full-time MBA rankings,the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania moves up three places to tie with Harvard University at No. 1. The Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago follows at No. 3, while Stanford University, the Sloan School of Business at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University tie at No. 4.

The study was conducted by finance professors Mark Egan of the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management, Gregor Matvos of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and Amit Seru of Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Kellogg’s Executive MBA program (#2), and Chicago Booth’s Executive MBA program (#3) maintained their positions in the global rankings, while also dominating the top spots in the Midwest regional ranking.

Most importantly for the U.S. News ranking, Berkeley Haas retained its high peer assessment score of 4.5 out of 5. That score, calculated from a fall 2016 survey that asked B-school deans and MBA program directors at 360 part-time MBA programs to rate the other part-time programs, accounts for 50% of the total measure of each school. Only Chicago Booth, at 4.7, received a higher score than Haas.

When the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business last needed a dean, it turned to Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business for one. Today (March 8), it went back to the GSB well and fished out yet another Stanford super star, Madhav V. Rajan, the school’s former senior associate dean for academic affairs.

By contrast, “the Republican plan, as outlined right now, really is centrally about income redistribution, of the reverse Robin Hood variety,” said Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economics professor who was chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Then three economics and finance professors—Scott Baker of Northwestern University, Nick Bloom of Stanford University and Steven Davis of the University of Chicago—created a series of Economic Policy Uncertainty, or EPU, indexes. And sure enough, according to Prof. Harvey, gold shows a modest historical correlation with the global version of the EPU.

Indeed, for all the business complaints about Obama’s actions during the Great Recession, work by the economists Atif Mian and Amir Sufi indicates that uncertainty about his policies had a trivial impact.

Chris Lecatsas-Lyus, director of career management for Chicago Booth in Europe, is a psychotherapist and career coach. Alongside colleagues in Chicago and Hong Kong, she offers coaching to alumni facing career dilemmas at the business school’s three global campuses and for any age up to retirement — even beyond, in some cases.

In June, Erik Hurst, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, delivered a graduation address and later wrote an essay in which he publicized statistics showing that, compared with the beginning of the millennium, working-class men in their 20s were on average working four hours less per week and playing video games for three hours.

During his stint as the Reserve Bank of India governor, Raghuram Rajan often found himself in the headlines. But after stepping down from the role and returning to academic life, he has judiciously stayed away from the media.

Writing on Italy’s experiences with Silvio Berlusconi, Luigi Zingales of the University of Chicago, argues that it is important to take the Trump Administration’s policy proposals seriously and to engage them substantively if they are to be effectively opposed or shaped.

Ayelet Fishbach, University of Chicago Jeffrey Breckenridge Keller professor of behavioral science and marketing, joins us to talk about how applying a few principles learned from behavioral research can improve our relationships – romantic and otherwise.

When Raghuram Rajan stepped down as the Reserve Bank of India’s governor in September last year, he left a gift for his successor — the gift of silence, to allow the new governor time and space to give voice to his ideas.

According to a recent paper by the economists Chang-Tai Hsieh, from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and Enrico Moretti, from the University of California, Berkeley, local land-use regulations reduce the United States’ economic output by as much as $1.5 trillion a year, or about 10 percent lower than it could be.

When you eat together, one thing that happens is that you're usually eating the same food as the other person. I was talking to Ayelet Fishbach at the University of Chicago. She told me that food has symbolic meaning all around the world.

To see why, take a look at the Financial Trust Index. A University of Chicago Booth School of Business team, headed by Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales, tracks how much people trust various economic entities -- banks, the stock market, mutual funds and large corporations.

Early this year, University of Chicago Booth School of Business professors Amir Sufi, Marianne Bertrand, and Randall S. Kroszner convened at the New York Hilton Midtown to talk about the top economic challenges facing Donald Trump, the current President of the United States.

For Raghuram Rajan, India's former rock star central banker, geopolitical risk is the primary worry in today's world. He ranks it ahead of a possible trade war and rising interest rates as reasons to lose sleep.

Randall Kroszner, professor of economics at University of Chicago Booth School of Business, looks at U.S. President Donald Trump's ability to affect change on bank regulations and discusses concerns of a Chinese banking crisis.

"The economy is facing a major crisis... it's on the brink of death... and while the economy is growing - slowly - workers' pay is still as stagnant as ever," said University of Chicago economist Hsieh Chang-tai.

To be sure, a booming stock market and a weak economy are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Investors could simply be expecting policies such as tax reform and deregulation to boost corporate profits, with little regard for the broader effect on growth. At least that's how economists interpreted the market's optimism in a recent poll by the Chicago Booth Business School.

But, for all the field’s potential, its advances seemed mostly to have served the private sector. (And there they often veered toward sly consumer coercion.) A prominent exception was the “nudge,” a notion advanced by the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein, now at Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago behavioral economist Richard Thaler, in their 2008 best-seller “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.”

A recent paper by Mara Faccio and Luigi Zingales, professors of finance at Purdue and Chicago universities, shows that government intervention in telecom markets is a common phenomenon in most countries.

Some economists say such intervention may be savvy politics but make markets less efficient. “We would expect such behavior from a dictator of a banana republic, not from the president-elect of the oldest democracy in the world,” said Luigi Zingales, a finance professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

One of my favorite new data sets that illustrates this is in a recent working paper co-written by the University of Chicago’s Thomas Wollmann, an economist who works at its Booth School of Business. It correlates 40 college football teams’ performance in the AP poll (a weekly measure of how good the teams are compared to others) over 14 years with their colleges’ success in raising research funding (via this great dataviz roundup).

(Translated) Five years ago, Luigi Zingales predicted the victory of Donald Trump. But his colleagues just laughed. How did Zingales, a professor at the prestigious University of Chicago, come up with the idea? Perhaps because he is an economist - he argued that the weak economic growth encouraged the rise of populists.

In many cases, schools like Harvard Business School are asking only a single MBA essay question. Some schools, like Chicago Booth, have gone even further in setting aside the traditional essay question for an alternate format.

Mian and a colleague, Amir Sufi at the University of Chicago, have argued that banks, confident they had a way to manage the risks, disproportionately increased lending to poor borrowers. To make their monthly payments, these households began skimping on other expenses, slowing the pace of economic activity overall.

The Federal Reserve’s plan to further withdraw support for the U.S. economy will ease pressure on other major central banks to keep up their own “aggressive” monetary stimulus, former Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan said.

But research by Nicholas Epley, of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, and Juliana Schroeder, of the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business, shows our instincts are wrong.